“We are the 99 percent.” That slogan carried the seeds of solidarity and a new political narrative. Meanwhile, there were a new crop of policy makers and academics, like the former Harvard professor Elizabeth Warren, talking about predatory loans and the increasing inability of working Americans to make ends meet. INET, the Institute for New Economic Thinking, was funded by George Soros to challenge neoliberal economics in academia and the media. Rob Johnson, the new institution’s president, and a former portfolio manager for Soros’s Quantum Fund, supported a new crop of thinkers challenging the old economic paradigms. (Johnson was a key source for my 2016 book, Makers and Takers: How Wall Street Destroyed Main Street.) Johnson, Soros, Warren, and a host of other key academics, policy makers, and financial market participants spoke in 2010 at a Roosevelt Institute conference, “Make Markets Be Markets,” which looked at how to bring integrity back to the U.S. financial system after the crisis.”
—Rana Foroohar, “The Great Reordering”
